You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Combining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders, such as American missionaries, through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana. The author examines and contrasts Amerindian and non-Amerindian views on this process of social transformation through the lens of the body, notions of peacefulness and kinship, as well as native warfare and shamanism. The book addresses questions of change and continuity, and the little explored links between first contacts, capture and native conversion to Christianity in contemporary indigenous Amazonia.
Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America. The volume shows how people create and reinforce their conditions of being by employing different genres of transgression and by creatively shifting contexts of significance. Local socio-cosmic orders, the interrelation of creative genres (myth, verbal art, song, ritual, and handicrafts), and their changing frames of reference (from communal celebrations to wider political and commercial realms) demonstrate the relational, generative, and processual quality of Amerindian creativity.
The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an “owner” and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distribution, and consumption of food and its role in establishing relations of asymmetrical mutuality and kinship, this book breaks theoretical ground for studies in Amazonia and beyond. By investigating how the feeding relation traverses Kanamari society—from the relation between women and the pets they raise, shaman and familiar spirit, mother and child, chiefs and followers, to those between the Brazilian state and the Kanamari—The Owners of Kinship reveals how the mutuality of kinship is determined by the asymmetry of ownership.
In this book the concept of mobility is explored for the archaeology of the Amazonian and Caribbean region. As a result of technological and methodological progress in archaeology, mobility has become increasingly visible on the level of the individual. However, as a concept it does not seem to fit with current approaches in Amazonian archaeology, which favour a move away from viewing small mobile groups as models for the deeper past. Instead of ignoring such ethnographic tyrannies, in this book they are considered to be essential for arriving at a different past. Viewing archaeological mobility as the sum of movements of both people and objects, the empirical part of Amotopoan Trails focuse...
Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organised crime and heritage. This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe.
Maroon Cosmopolitics: Personhood, Creativity and Incorporation sheds further light on the contemporary modes of Maroon circulation and presence in Suriname and in the French Guiana. The contributors assembled in the volume look to describe Maroon ways of inhabiting, transforming and circulating through different localities in the Guianas, as well as their modes of creating and incorporating knowledge and artefacts into their social relations and spaces. By bringing together authors with diverse perspectives on the situation of the Guianese Maroon at the twenty-first century, the volume contributes to the anthropological literature on Maroon societies, providing ethnographic, and historical depth and legitimacy to the contemporary lives of the descendants of those who fled from slavery in the Americas.
Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribution instead provides ethnographic explorations of indigenous politics, perspectives and worlds, revealing loss and suffering as well as creative strategies to mediate the extralocal. Seeking to avoid conceptual imperialism or the imposition of exogenous categories, the chapters are grounded in the respective authors’ long-standing field research. The authors examine the reactions (from resistance to accommodation), consequences (from anticipation to rubble) and materials (from fossil fuel to water) diversely related to extractivism in rural and urban settings. How can Amerindian strategies to preserve localised communities in extractivist contexts contribute to ways of thinking otherwise?
Crude Domination is an innovative and important book about a critical topic – oil. While there have been numerous works about petroleum from ‘experience-far’ perspectives, there have been relatively few that have turned the ‘experience-near’ ethnographic gaze of anthropology on the topic. Crude Domination does just this among more peoples and more places than any other volume. Its chapters investigate nuances of culture, politics and economics in Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia as they pertain to petroleum. They wrestle with the key questions vexing scholars and practitioners alike: problems of the economic blight of the resource curse, underdevelopment, democracy, violence and war. Additionally they address topics that may initially appear insignificant – such as child witches and lionmen, fighting for oil when there is no oil, reindeer nomadism, community TV – but which turn out on closer scrutiny to be vital for explaining conflict and transformation in petro-states. Based upon these rich, new worlds of information, the text formulates a novel, domination approach to the social analysis of oil.
A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela.
This volume investigates the relationship between migration, identity, kinship and population. It uncovers the institutional practices of categorization as well as the conducts and the ethics adopted by social actors that create divisions between citizens and non-citizens, migrants and their descendants inside national borders. The essays provide multiple empirical analyses that capture the range of politics, debates, regulations, and documents through which the us/them distinction comes to be constructed and reconstructed. At the same time, the authors reveal how this distinction is experienced, reinterpreted, and reproduced by those directly affected by governmental actions. This perspecti...